Aromatic Escape

Many of you have been asking about Aromatic Escape and why I closed the business.  I actually had many reasons.  During our various conversations, I may have shared one or two of them with you.  But, I'll go ahead and share them all now, here.

1. I have told many of you that it is because I am tired of working all the time.  This is very true.  It seemed like all of my free time was being spent working.  Even though I cut my hours at work back from 9 hours to 6 hours, I was still working all the time.  I have my job that is now 6 hours a day so that I could get home in time to pick up Aaron from school. (Loving this!) I have my morning real estate assistant job, that I have to get up about an hour earlier than I normally would, it only takes about half an hour, but it can vary, so I make sure I have the time to get it done.  Then, I would have the afternoon and evening for Aromatic Escape.  Aromatic Escape was obviously not a thriving business or I would be able to quit everything else and just do it.  But, I was busy enough that I was busy.  But, not busy enough to make it worth the effort I was putting into it.  If I was always working, what was the point in getting off "work" early so that I could spend time with Aaron, if I was spending it working?

2. I had decided in the middle of 2011 to go in another direction with Aromatic Escape.  I was going to delve into home parties.  This had worked well in the distant past.  I had 3 friends that were eager to be my first consultants.  I had the pictures taken for the catalog (Thank you to my wonderful family for being patient and agreeing to go through that process with me).  I had designed all the order forms, flyers and the catalogs and was ready to go.  All of it took me a good 6 months to prepare.  Then, I sat down and started adding up all the printing fees, the license renewal fees, the website renewal fees, the website design fees (I would need to have a more professional site).  It was going to cost me a couple thousand dollars just to get this new direction started.  Aromatic Escape did not have the money itself to pay for those fees.  So, that meant I would have to foot the bill.  I can think of so many other things that my family can do with a couple thousand than put it into Aromatic Escape, right now.  Not that we have a couple thousand just laying around...

3. Most of you know what trouble I was having from the Freebie sites posting about a free sample that I had offered to my 200 Facebook fans.  They took my post and posted it on their sites.  So, I got well over 10,000 requests for FREE samples.  The samples, I could handle, but the stamp fees would have been astronomical.  So, at first I explained on my Facebook page that I just couldn't handle all the requests and would send out what I could.  Then, towards the end, when months later, I was still getting at least 100 requests a day, I started trying to reply to each one and explain that I was a small company and couldn't afford to send the samples that the Freebie Site promised.  I actually got nasty replies back.  So, I quit sending those.  All the people requesting the samples were saying how wonderful the free publicity was and how I should be thanking the freebie sites instead of being upset with them for not checking with me before posting the free sample.  Those sites should get permission to repost my offer.  I got free publicity all right, but I'm afraid that most of it turned out to be bad publicity because I couldn't fulfill the promise that they made.  So, what's the point in continuing a company that has all that bad publicity when I don't have the money to fight back and turn it around?

So, even if I am able to come up with the time and money to bring Aromatic Escape back.  I would love to be able to do so, I had a good product that everyone loved.  But, unfortunately, it will have to be under a completely new name...